The Cartoonist (17 page)

The
crack
of the closing hood jerked her back to the present and the drab reality of the garage. Behind her, the baseball game droned hectically toward the top of the inning. In the car Kath startled awake. She gazed half-lidded around the dimly lit bay, then nestled comfortably back to sleep.

“Loose clamp, all right,” the mechanic said as he hurried back inside, his quick eyes darting to the screen as the commentator’s voice went wild over a play. “Needed some antifreeze, though.”

“Anything,” Krista said. “Just so long as I can drive.”

Five minutes later they were back on the road, the temperature gauge a lifeless black square in the dash. Following the mechanic’s instructions, Krista turned south instead of backtracking north and then east to I-95. He said she would find a link-up with the Interstate about three miles from the station...and there it was.

The left turn gave onto a little-used road reminiscent of the ones they’d traveled in New Hampshire the day before. All at once the countryside was cloaked in an almost unearthly dark, the high beams reflecting back as if from a solid thing. Here and there yellow oblongs of light glowed faintly in the pitch, farmhouses set well back from the road. There was no traffic.

“Are we there yet?”

Absorbed in her own musings, Krista jumped at the sound of Kath’s voice. “Close, hon,” she said. “Real close now. Why don’t you sleep some more?”

“Not tired.”

Kath had been a princess through it all, Krista thought now, through this whole botched-up odyssey. She could have fussed and complained and made things a whole lot worse than they were. But she hadn’t. That precocity again, Krista decided. A small tantrum might even have been fun. They could have had one together.

There was a groundhog dead in the road, near the ghostly center line. A large black bird, a crow or a raven, took a last quick tug at a rope of intestine before winging up out of the way. Krista hadn’t thought birds did anything at night but sleep. The demolished groundhog glowed for a moment, then faded to black behind the car.

Doing a passable impersonation of Mr. Rogers, Kath said, “Poor Mister Groundhog,” and craned her neck to watch it vanish into the night.

Krista glanced at the dash clock, then wedged her foot more firmly against the accelerator. Ahead of them the road banked hard to the left. The dark maw of the ditch opened briefly, then closed again as Krista corrected the car’s trajectory.

“Grrr-reat green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts...” Kath, in her worst singing voice.

“Kath,” Krista said, laughing. “That’s rude.” It was a song she’d sung herself as a girl. Hearing it now brought back memories of campfires and late-night ghost stories.

“I know.” Kath giggled. “Come on, Mom. Join in. Grrrrreat green gobs of...”

Krista picked up the chorus: “...greasy grimy gopher guts, simulated monkey’s feet, constipated birdie’s tweet...”

The car shot over one of those stomach-dropping humps in the road.
“Whoooh,”
Krista said, accelerating in time with the limerick. Inclining upward now, the road banked steeply to the left.

“...all wrapped up in poison purple platypus and I forgot my spooooon...”

Beyond the incline the road jigged hard to the right, more sharply than Krista had anticipated. She was going much too fast to stop.

Only gradually understanding the change in her mother’s face, Kath finished the song with a sort of vaudeville slide: “I’ll—use—a—strawww...
sluuuurp!
” Then she shifted her gaze out through the windshield.

There was someone standing in the middle of the road, weaving drunkenly.

In the span of milliseconds that passed before the inevitable collision, several thoughts surged through Krista’s mind. None of them, however, had anything to do with her past life. During none of that brief, surreal interval did she imagine any harm might come to Kath or herself. She wondered what a drunk was doing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of no place. A part of her decided, quite coldly, that no way was she taking the ditch to avoid hitting this misfit (probably some retarded product of barnyard inbreeding), ruining the car—

(
is something wrong with his face?
)

risking her daughter’s life—

(
his clothes?
)

and her own. She realized fleetingly that Kath’s seat belt was fastened and that her own was not. She wondered how much (more) damage would be done to the car and would the man be killed? and what was Scott going to say?

(
is he grinning?
)

Instinct or reflex or simple humanity took control of Krista’s hands then, and she jerked the wheel hard to the right, trying to avoid this doomed man—

(
is it a
child??)

—in the road.

Like a dumb animal, the figure lurch-stumbled in the same direction as the car. Krista cranked the wheel hard to the right.

Kath screamed.

There followed a blunt metallic crunch—then the windshield shattered, became a swarm of angry, needling shards. The figure came through the glass headfirst, directly in front of Kath, and for a split second—the space of a discharging flashbulb—Krista saw its face in the dashlights. Most of one side of it had been torn away, and the jaw hung loosely agape, unhinged and drooling black blood.

Then something solid loomed up before them, brightened, and Krista was out of her seat, impacting the roof with her skull, grappling through numbness with the macabre idea—the wholly
insane
idea—that the face bursting through the windshield had already seen death, which followed her down an airless shaft into that most unforgiving darkness.

The car came abruptly to rest against a low fieldstone fence. Steam escaped the crumpled hood. The horn, jammed into life, bleat a constant, ululating note into the unheeding night.

Nothing moved.

SCOTT DECIDED TO HAVE THAT drink after all. He told the stewardess to make it a stiff one. As he sipped it, he forced his mind into a more positive frame.

His girls would be there. Both of them. Standing at the top of the debarking ramp or huddled together near the baggage carousels, Bowman’s harem in full regalia, all smiles and warm hugs. Sure, tonight was the full moon—he’d checked it against his wallet calendar—but that was merely a detail, part of the horror-comic veneer. Any good graveyard scene had to have a full moon. It was a given. Krista and Kath were in Boston, they had to be. They’d probably arrived there in the forenoon. They would be at the airport and he would greet them, pull Krista close and squeeze her until he heard ribs snap. Kath would kiss him and then wrap his thumb in her hand, swinging his arm as they ambled out to the car. And Krista would tell him the whole sad tale all over again, her Newfie upbringing making it impossible for her to skip the part about the cow shitting itself on the hood.

It would all be all right.

These thoughts followed him down into a restless stupor born of exhaustion, too much booze and that gnawing, unappeasable fear.

The dream came instantly.

A tombstone like the stump of an amputated limb poked through the ground-mist of his imagination. In the stark realism of this dream Scott could see the stone’s Gothic inscription, but was unable to spirit his dream-eye close enough to decipher the words. A sudden wet tearing sound issued from the soil fronting the marker and then rot-blackened fingers groped into the frosty night air. An eyeless head followed, black tongue hideously lolling, yellow teeth glinting in the moonlight. Then came the hunched and creaking shoulders, slowly excavating themselves from the tomb with a sick sucking sound....

Scott awoke in a lather of sweat. A stewardess was standing over him, one hand on his shoulder, the smile gone from her pretty face.

The seat beside him was vacant. The jet was on the tarmac in front of Logan International.

Gathering his things, Scott hurried down the aisle to the exit.

* * *

There was no one waiting for him at the top of the debarking ramp. No one at the baggage claim, either.

A weight like a millstone settled on Scott’s shoulders. He called Caroline from a pay phone to ask if his girls were there.

“No, not yet,” Caroline said. “Krista called this afternoon...said they had some trouble with the car. A hole in the radiator, I think. She said she’d pick you up at the airport before coming out here.”

Fear, now a familiar companion, doubled the weight on Scott’s shoulders. He stood there with his ear pressed to the receiver.

“Should I drive out and pick you up?” Caroline said, filling the void of Scott’s silence.

“No,” Scott said, his voice nearly failing him. “You’d better stay there in case she calls or shows up. I’ll wait here. I can see the Delta off-ramp from where I’m standing. Get a pencil, I’ll give you the number of this booth. Call me if you hear anything.”

Scott read off the seven digits and hung up. Then he sat in a plastic contour chair by the phone and began to wait, powerless to block the horrible certainty that spawned in his heart. He spent the next forty minutes searching every face that passed. Once, he was right out of his chair, jostling past glares of annoyance, lurching toward an auburn-haired woman in a blue windbreaker, and a child...but the woman was twenty and the child was a boy.

When the phone rang forty minutes later and Caroline’s sobbing voice told him Krista was dead, Scott closed his eyes and collapsed into a dead faint on the concourse floor. The darkness came quickly, like a summer storm. His head struck the ceramic tiles like a flung melon, opening a gash in his scalp. Two things followed him down: one thought—

(
What about Kath?
)

—and a voice, Caroline’s voice, high, singsong, childlike, growing tauntingly louder and louder...

Krista is deh-ed, Krista is deh-ed, Krista Is Dead...!! KRISTA IS DEAD!!”

LATER, SCOTT WOULD REMEMBER LITTLE of the hours that followed. He lay on the concourse floor for what seemed a lifetime. When he opened his eyes he saw the receiver, dangling at the end of its coil. No one had seen him fall and now people avoided him as they would a drunk. Fighting a fresh tide of vertigo, Scott gathered himself up, dropped heavily into the contour chair and snared the receiver. He could feel warm blood braiding its way through the hair on the back of his head.

“Hello?” the receiver squawked repeatedly, the voice now a man’s. “Hello?”

Hearing a man’s voice, Scott clutched at the slim hope that this had all been some dreadful prank...but when he replied, the voice said it belonged to an officer of the state highway patrol.

“Are you all right, Doctor Bowman?” Scott could hear sobs in the background...Caroline.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not. Is it...?”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid it’s true. I regret having to give you this news. I would have called personally, but Miss Patterson here went straight to the phone when I told her about the accident. At the time I had no idea of the circumstances or who she intended to call—”

“Where...wh...” Scott stammered. Then, nearly shouting,: “What about Kath? What about my daughter?”

“Your daughter is in the hospital,” the voice said—and Scott sensed a reticence in it that terrified him. “Her condition is listed as critical. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. Can you get yourself to the General Hospital in Danvers? If not, I can have a cruiser by there in about twenty minutes—”

“No...I’ll find a cab.” He could hear himself saying the words, but had no idea what they meant. “How far?”

“A half-hour’s drive due north of the airport. The driver will know. Will you be all right?”

“How is Caroline going to get there? Caroline ought to be there....”

“I’ll take her in my car.”

Scott hung up.

And when he did, he realized that none of this was real. It was a dream, and if it wasn’t a dream then it was a drunken hallucination. But it wasn’t real.

No. Not real.

It’s a kind of shock
, he could hear himself telling an aggrieved patient only a few days earlier, an elderly gent who had just lost his wife of thirty years. Scott had kept his voice professionally somber:
It’s like a concussion, a sort of shell shock, if you will. It clouds the vision, distorts reality. It will pass,
he had assured the weeping old man.
It will pass and then you will grieve and then you will go on....

They were words he’d read somewhere. Now they echoed in emptiness.

With the strap of his TWA flightbag wound tight in his grip, Scott moved away from the phone and shifted into the concourse, where he stood like a buoy in a river of people...determined people, smiling people, people with places to go...yes...he had someplace to go....

Forgetting his luggage, Scott left the airport concourse, with its brightly colored pennants and busily geometric ceiling, and stepped out under the portico. There, a black man in a burgundy uniform led him to a taxi and helped him inside.

“The hospital in Danvers,” Scott said.

The cabby hoisted the meter flag. “The General?”

Scott nodded and the cab lurched away. In the back seat he gazed out the window at the twinkling city lights.

So many lights...

* * *

The Danvers General Hospital, squat and widely spread out, was a patchwork of new grafted onto old. From the lobby a crusty old security officer led Scott along a series of antiseptic corridors to the Emergency Ward. Here he was met by a graying, tired-looking man in a vested suit who identified himself as Jim Holley, the county coroner. At first Scott expected the man to apologize, to tell him there had been a huge and unforgivable error, a regrettable case of mistaken identity.
We are truly sorry, sir, for whatever distress this blunder may have caused you.

Instead, the hollow-eyed coroner asked him if he felt up to viewing the body for the purposes of identification.

What body?
Scott’s mind bellowed. But he only shook his head. “I want to see my daughter.” He noticed the curtain drawn across a cubicle at the far end of the examining area and wondered if Krista was behind it.